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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

So, a part of Microsoft will advocate for SQL server, and another part will develop for PostgreSQL? Isn't it weird? Why would Microsoft want this?

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Because MS is more and more in the business of selling the operation of software as a service, instead of selling licenses for their customers to operate themselves.

Think of them like a wedding event rental company, they are more than happy to rent you their own brand of tables, flatware, and silverware, but if you want another brand that’s fine too as long is you buy from them.

Microsoft is hedging their bets. PostgreSQL has the potential to disrupt the traditional relational database market, so if they're going to be disrupted then better to do it themselves.

I expect they'll also try to port Citus Data functionality to the SQL Server platform.

Disrupt how? Haven't they been part of the traditional relational database market for years now? What's changing?

People outside open source are noticing.

Also PostgreSQL has improved by large margins in the last five years. The software is more akin to a pyramid rather than a skyscraper. The foundation took a long time, but now that its complete there is a strong base for growth.

It's a little bit like Linux in the late 90s. Postgres is increasingly being used in financial services, for instance, because it's "good enough" -- many teams really don't need Oracle's or SQL Server's feature-set, and Postgres has enough 'interesting' features of its own.

It also lets teams own their DB infrastructure and play around with deployment patterns that'd make little sense on Oracle et al because of cost reasons.

It's not that Postgres is "killing" commercial databases, it's just that more and more people are, as you said, noticing that they don't need a commercial database for lots of use cases. And support and consultancy -- and even in-team skills -- for Postgres are often available.

Shifts in the database world happen at a glacial pace. They've been a part of that world for a long time yes, but they're steadily becoming more and more legit and acceptable as an alternative to Oracle, SQL server.

Postgres is a nice open-source platform but the commercial engines are far more advanced in many areas and are not going to be disrupted anytime soon. If you can use Postgres for your needs today than it's likely that any relational system would've worked and you didn't need a commercial system in the first place.

SQL Server platform already has one of the most advanced optimizers and distributed planning with its use in Polybase, stretch tables, SQL MPP and Azure SQL DW.

At the end of the day, even if you find a better alternative, database engines are a bear to switch. Our database is still SQL Server, even though we've switched our development platform 3 times, and I'd love to be on Postgres.

Postgres also has a number of commercial derivatives, so you get the advantage of starting small (open source) and moving to a more optimized derivative when it becomes necessary.

Aster and Greenplum perform exceptionally for what they do. If SQL Server were better that's exactly what companies would use. Commercial engines are definitely more advanced. But some Postgres derivatives can absolutely out perform enterprise platforms in some uses-cases, and vice-versa.

They are more advanced in many levels, a bit behind on the dev friendliness side (postgres is kind there), that's true.

However I manage roughly 2000 instances of commercial databases. I'd say maybe a 10th could not be hosted on postgres.

It gives postgres a huge disruption potential and the management, in all the big firms I know, is actively looking at it.

Yes, PG has many more usability features. Simple things like UPSERT make UX improvements if you don't need the advanced capabilities of MSSQL.

I'm sure PG can take on more of the standard RDBMS workloads today but I don't think that's really making a big dent on SQL Server as the bulk of their revenue comes from the serious enterprise scenarios.

> I don't think that's really making a big dent on SQL Server as the bulk of their revenue comes from the serious enterprise scenarios.

I'd say postgres can take 90% of the revenues. I've worked in 3 of the top 10 european banks. Most of the SQL Server instances do not even need partitioning, for example. Let alone always on, hekaton and so forth.

People mostly buy peace of mind. Until they are charged millions and start questioning the stupid expensive bills saying "do we need that ?"

Really I have all the metrics to back this up: CPU usage/Availability requirements/data size... It is literally my job to collect those.

Also, proper window support, great postgis, great json support, open source ecosystem support are not simple and huge cost savers.

Revenue for what? Postgres is free.

If you mean the licensing and support from commercial distributions and vendors then, as you already recognize, these decisions will fall to which vendor they trust more. That will usually end up being Microsoft.

You do not trust a vendor who rips you off.

It's not the fault of the vendor if you decide to buy their product. If you didn't need the product features then you shouldn't buy it but enterprise deals are rarely about the absolute price.

Indeed. And as I said this reasoning might eat 90% of sql server's revenue.

Proffesional PostgreSQL support is not free, and the banks would most likely buy support from some company just like they currently support for SQL Server.

>>> "If you mean the licensing and support from commercial distributions and vendors then, as you already recognize, these decisions will fall to which vendor they trust more."

Enterprises are more than just banks, and vendor relationships matter. They're not fungible and are rarely based on price.

Well that's exactly how technology market disruption works. The disruptive product sneaks into the low end of the market without any of the established competitors really noticing. Then the disruptive product gradually moves up market and eats everyone's lunch.

15 years ago Windows Server was far more advanced than any Linux distribution. What does the server OS market look like today?

I moved from SQL Server to Postgres 5 years ago, I would argue the opposite, ie PG is way better. eg pg supports UTF8, csv, jsonb It has way more standard SQL features and support, such as windows analytical and aggregation functions, string agg is particularly powerful. More SQL join options, join on using clause is v handy, lateral join is standard SQL and v powerful and much easier to understand than SQL servers obtuse version. It’s user defined functions are far more powerful, even with standard sql, let alone the umpteem other languages you can use such as Python or Javascript, functions can be chained for incredible power. Many Dev friendly features make you much more productive eg drop schema and the ability to easily use powerful editors such as sublime text or VSCode. With Recent parallel query improvements pg has mostly caught up on performance, it’s only glaring weakness vs Oracle now is lack of auto incremental mat view refresh - MS auto mat views had so many limitations they were almost pointless, last time I looked - pg mat views have no restrictions but are not that useful because they lack incremental refresh.

Yes PG has more usability features but it is not a match on performance at all and lacks the advanced features that enterprises want. I don't know why this is so shocking to hear. These commercial engines have billions of dollars in research and engineering, they're not just standing still and aren't obsolete because PG finally got parallel query (which is only workable in v11 and still years behind the others). There's a reason why all the enterprise PG distributions add so many other features and even basics like connection pooling, because that's what it takes to compete in the enterprise space with its vast and complex requirements.

As I said, "If you can use Postgres then you didn't need a commercial system in the first place."

May be MS is just too rich that they can afford to do stuff like that. But, that sounds very bad for Citus. Now they are PostgreSQL experts. With MS, they will be salesmen who are try to sell extra bloat that will also work with SQL server. Pity to lose such engineering effort in PostgreSQL community.

I doubt Microsoft is as worried about "disruption" than just expanding their reach. The number of developers who currently run Postgres (hell, even the number of customer Citus currently has) is far greater than the numbers likely to completely switch from SQL Server to Postgres.

Azure gives you Linux and Windows as options for hosting, because money is money and engineers are not free.

For a similar business reason as to why Azure offers Linux, Microsoft develops for Android and iPhone and Oracle owns MySQL.

Microsoft doesn't regard PostgreSQL as a direct threat to SQL Server and it's happy to make money where it can so long as it doesn't perceive something to be a mortal threat.

That is what I am observing too.

Offering services is far more lucrative than a single product. That's the entire cloud computing business model.

Azure is happy to take your money to run SQL Server or Postgres, just like how Amazon has been running Aurora side-by-side with Oracle and SQL Server for years now.

If you could switch from Oracle, you would switch to mySQL, thus oracle buys mySQL to keep control of the enterprise market.. If you could switch from MS SQL you would probably switch to PostgreSQL, thus MS wants to control part of the PostgreSQL enterprise market. If you would switch from Facebook, you would probably go to Instagram. Whatever you choose, the money will end up in the same pocket.

Same reason why Microsoft wants libraries for languages like Ruby to talk to SQL Server (at the cost of ASP.net adoption - I had the pleasure of speaking to that team at RubyConf one year) or to run SQL Server on Linux (at the cost of Windows licenses). Expanding their breadth benefits the company overall, and they know there will be some who never run SQL Server or Windows, yet 2019 Microsoft wants to have solutions for those folks.

Why did Facebook buy Instagram? Look at all the various travel sites. They are all owned by priceline.

Same thing as Oracle owning MySQL. Keep your friends close but enemies closer.

They shifted a lot of focus to Azure.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL competes against RDS and to a lesser extent, Google's Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL.

They'll still sell MS SQL Server too. But sometimes PostgreSQL is a better fit for your stack, or your preference, and they want your money for them to provide that too.

for azure?

It is all about choice. As both AWS and Azure user, I can attest that Microsoft is doing a lot more with OSS and contributing than AWS. We are both a SQL Server and PostgreSQL shop and are excited about this move by Microsoft and Citus.

hosted postgres is already available on azure, ala rds.

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